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| being pro life outside the political arena | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Nov 12 2008, 06:24 AM (4,731 Views) | |
| brenda | Nov 19 2008, 06:34 PM Post #426 |
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You say you just baked cookies? I'll pm you my address to send me a box.
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“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.” ~A.A. Milne | |
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| blondie | Nov 19 2008, 11:02 PM Post #427 |
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Bull-Carp
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Just snooping here tonight. Am reading IT's & Mr. Moon's comments. So here's my post as a contribution.
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| Moonbat | Nov 20 2008, 02:35 AM Post #428 |
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Pisa-Carp
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The perception point was just that perception of a difference does not implicitly require classification: we can perceive a difference without identifying what that difference is. I thought you were claiming otherwise but perhaps not.
Sure but we can classify in many different ways, the world is independent of our choice of classification. All those different ways of describing the difference between the two pictures encapsulate the same information.
It's this notion of a unit of organised matter that i think is something we get to choose, it's not something in the world. Suppose we consider an imaginary universe the same as ours in every way except that the imaginary Moonbat of yesterday is not the same unit as the imaginary Moonbat of today. In that universe every small change, every instant constitutes a new unit. When we compare a unit to it's ancestor unit(s) we see that each new unit inherits the memories and personality traits of the previous unit (plus whatever small change has occured). So we shouldn't really call all of these different units "Moonbat" since they are different units. We might label them Moonbat.time.date to express this notion that a change in time constitutes a change in unit or identity. (if we try to have a different name for every different instant we would quickly run out of names). Now the key question comes when we ask ourselves what's are the actual differences between this imaginary universe and our real universe and after some thought we realise that they are in fact no differences. All the motions will be the same i.e. the motions of the Moonbat.time.dates over some period of time in our imaginary universe will be the same as the motion of Moonbat in our universe. Now suppose you come along and you tell me that i've got these two universes the wrong way round. You tell me that the real universe is the one where there are a continuum of Moonbat.time.dates each passing on memory and state of mind to the next Moonbat.time+1.date and that the imaginary universe, the fiction, is the one where there is just the one singular Moonbat unit. I immediately move to reject this claim but i'm stymied when i ask myself what it would feel like to the continuum of Moonbat.time.dates each one existing only for a fleeting instant. I realise i have absolutely no way of telling that this instant as i think about i'm not just the latest Moonbat.time.date existing for a flicker and then as i think about it again that i'm not another Moonbat.time.date existing for a flicker having been given memory and state of mind from it's Moonbat ancestors. These two universe are entirely indistinguishable. The reason is because it's the same universe. All i'm doing is choosing to look at the same reality in two different ways. Nothing is changing but my choice of units. How long is a metre rule? 1 unit, 100 units, 1000 units, a million? 124.5? It's up to us. We choose units reality is independent of those choices.
I don't think it relates to certainty but whether statements mean anything - it means something to say that i'm in England and on the Earth - a universe where i'm not on England right now is a different universe to one where i am. (And i can be certain beyond reasonable doubt that i am indeed in England and on the Earth based on sets of observations). But when you say i can't be sure my girlfriend is my girlfriend then i don't think that means anything.
Thought experiments can show intuition to be inconsistent in and of itself or be used to explore the consequences of theories that we have evidence for or just ideas that are being proposed. E.g. there is the classic one which involves us imagining that we remove a neurone and replace it with a silicon chip that is functionally equivalent. Now we can lose a neurone without any consequence to us at all, so replacing it with something identical from the perspective of the other neurones can't possibly have any impact. The intuition is that after this swap i'm still me. I'm still the same unit i've just got a small chip in my head. But of course then I can do it again and again, and each step the intuition tells me that i'm still me i've just got some chips in my head. So then in the end up with an entirely silicon brain and the intuition is that it must be true that it's still me. But simply by doing it all in one go and not progressively i.e building a silicon brain that's functionally equivalent to my own then chucking our my real brain and putting the electronic one in my head results in the intuition that i've been killed and some electronic doppelgänger has been put in our place. The resolution of the paradox is inline with that i mention above it is the the realisation that our notions of identity or units are infact mental constructs useful fictions not aspects of the actual world. This shouldn't really suprise us too much, because whilst these intuitions seem very core and so implicit in the everyday way we see the world around us they exist only because they were evolutionarily useful. They are pragmatical tools that help(ed) us live and mate in the environment of 10,000 years ago and indeed a very useful in day to day life today but that they are fall apart when we try to use them to understand the nature of reality is to be expected.
If they aren't robots i.e. they experience pain them I do care about them (though of course acting as if you experience pain doesn't definitively mean you do - we can make robots that look to us as if they are feel pain but it's hard to see how they could be.)- I care about anything that thinks/feels but I have to be consistent. If i ignore all other influences then i absolutely agree don't hurt or do anything that reduces the experience of the embryo the same is true about animals. If we ignore all other factors then the answer is easy: don't do anything that reduces the experience of any subset of the universe that can be said to be aware. But nothing is simple because you get conflicts of interests, our actions with respect to one mind are not independent of other minds. How do i justify hurting animals for example by doing medical research? The only possible justification is that doing so ultimately leads to less pain and suffering 'over all'. Suppose i shy away from that, because it certainly seems horrific to willing hurt stuff. But that's ultimately self defeating because it means a pick universe with more negative experiences over one with less when i'm saying what matters are experiences. The only approach available is something like utilitarianism where i try and ask myself how to go about maximising the experiences of the universe and when i have to make these horrific tradeoffs i fall back either on rules of thumb that seem to have worked well at good good outcomes in the past or I try and imagine a kind of universal mind that sequentially experiences the lives of every mind that has ever or will ever exist and then i try to do what it's in the best interest of that universal mind. |
| Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem | |
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4:25 PM Jul 10